The damage to R&D caused by bureaucrats planning the creative process
Here’s a letter from Bill McClean, chief at Navy’s China Lake and led the Sidewinder development, to the deputy chief of Naval Operations: We find […]
R&D
Diversity of funding criteria is key to accelerating S&T
Tyler Cowen: How would you improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science — Western science? David Deutsch: … I think the present system of […]
Redefining military readiness for Great Power Competition
Under the current readiness paradigm, our answer to “what needs to be ready?” is “the stuff we have today.” However, as we observed earlier, the […]
Up to 50% of military R&D goes to paper, not product
Opinion on documentation requirements is divergent. Practically all non-Government respondents contrast the sparse documentation which accompanies private R. & D. programs with that provided by […]
Two definitions of weapon systems “concurrency”
Because of the uncertainties and perceived criticality of ICBMs, the WDD and Ramo-Wooldridge believed it unwise to rely on only one approach. If it did […]
Armen Alchian’s radical proposal for military R&D — will we ever take heed?
When analyzed together, they confirmed the hypotheses that Armen Alchian had first made in 1953 about the dangers of applying systems analysis to weapons acquisition […]
How shared equipment dramatically lowers barriers to deep tech R&D
In the same way that AWS dramatically lowered the bar to start a software company, you’re seeing the same thing of multiple labs-as-a-service companies that […]
Where should Congress focus on weapons choice?
In terms of R. & D. projects, Congress by their own admission can only sample perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of unrelated […]
Strategies for R&D contracting
Parenthetically we may note that CPFF contracts might be used more effectively than they have been in R&D work. Rather than concentrating on the final […]
Bill Janeway has an interesting story on technological revolutions
At the frontier, advanced progress is made by trial-and-error and error and error and error. Efficiency in the allocation of resources means doing this calculus of net-present value, expected future cash flows, cost versus benefits. But, at the frontier, you can’t define the benefits.